Reddit – Why every marketer should be there!

For many, Reddit seems like a distant planet when it comes to social platforms.

For those who do not know how it works, at first glance, the site may seem cluttered, where everything is out of place. In this case, it is different images, simple articles, unnecessary links and many communities.

But beneath the facade is a quality-customized experience fueled by a thriving and engaged community.

Unfortunately, too many marketers ignore Reddit.

Often, marketers have a biased attitude towards Reddit and begin to use it with apprehension.

After all, winning over the Reddit community takes a lot of work.

Redditors are a smart connection – they will smell your marketing campaign a mile away. Unauthentic users will be banned. But those who learn how to become part of the community and add value can reap the following benefits (and more):

• Traffic
• Branding
• Testing of new products
• Sale of products
• Reaching the interests of your audience

This is why continuing to ignore Reddit is a complete failure for a marketer.

Reddit Stats You Can’t Ignore

I’ve been at Reddit since 2006. Since then, Reddit has grown into a billion-dollar enterprise.

Reddit is also supported by an amazing demographic.

Here are 13 outstanding statistics about Reddit:

• №3 site in the USA, #7 in the world
• 330 million monthly active users (MAU – monthly active users)
• 44% of the total MAU is attributed to mobile applications / mobile Internet
• 79% of users are between the ages of 18 and 34; this figure is 58% if we talk about mobile Internet and mobile application users 46.7 million searches per day
• 51% of users are in the US
• 70% of users speak English 14 billion views per month
• 10 million messages per month and more 370,000 daily
• 2.8 million comments daily
• 58 million votes per day
• More than 138,000 active communities
• More than 80,000 moderators

The Pew Research Center highlighted some data, including:

• 42% have a college degree
• 35% earn $75,000 a year

Ways to get involved in Reddit Reddit differs from other social networks in a very special way. Reddit’s audience is one that is interested in learning and engaging with each other in depth about any topic imaginable.

The beauty of Reddit is that users themselves choose the topics in which they want to participate in different communities (so-called subreddits). This contrasts with social networks such as Facebook, where branded content can appear intrusive to users.

Reddit continues to grow, offering users new features (which you can follow in r/announcements and r/blog).

Bottom Line: Reddit is becoming more and more what social media should have been.

Let’s look at some of the main ways marketers and companies interact:

Message
A Reddit post can consist of text, links, images, or videos, and there are many ways to use posts to connect with Redditors.

Make sure you only choose and engage with the subreddits that are most relevant to you and your business.

There are many nuances to posting, so it’s best to understand the culture and learn the global guidelines and rules that apply to the subreddit (each community has its own) before diving in.

Profile pages

Profile pages on Reddit work similarly to profile pages on other social sites, where a brand can have its own message feed and users can track and send messages to the profile manager.

Brands like Nintendo, Audi, Time Magazine, WWE, and the Washington Post all have profile pages. (You can also follow the search engine log.)

Ask Me Anything (AMA)

The r/IAmA subreddit features posts by users who invite other Redditors to ask whatever they want.

It’s a popular community (with over 18 million subscribers at the time of writing) that has become even more popular among interested people.

For example, Elon Musk and John Malkovich participated in AMA. A bonus can be that AMAs also attract media attention.

Sponsored content
Businesses can post ads on Reddit’s desktop and mobile apps for as little as $5 a day on the self-service platform, and offer advertising at scale.

Case studies for driving awareness with discounted content exist for Toyota, Coca-Cola, and Duracell.

With these tools in hand, there are endless ways to engage with your target audience on Reddit for things like:

• Attracting traffic to your site
• User testing on products
• Branding and awareness
• Focus group
• Direct sales

Marketing Success Stories on Reddit

Three keys to success on Reddit:

• Become a member of the community
• Do not play or spam the system
• Be careful with marketing (users have historically been against this, although it has become more popular over time).

Reddit isn’t more complicated than other social networks, it’s just more “real”.

Businesses that succeed on Reddit follow the same principles that are necessary for success in any community and approach Reddit as a place to connect with like-minded people.

Big brands and small businesses alike have found success on Reddit. Let’s look at a couple of cases.

Transamerica: Reddit as a focus group Transamerica is a large financial brand that operates various life insurance companies and investment firms in the US. About four years ago, the brand ran a campaign on Reddit, using the audience as focus groups to create content to help Redditors answer questions about finances.

Transamerica has identified key audiences to reach in the finance division.
The theme and content were well executed – here are some highlights:

• Transamerica showed that the brand knew what it was doing in terms of community benefits, from the title to the type of post (a stand-alone post that doesn’t contain links but keeps the content within the platform).
• The post revealed that Transamerica had Redditors on staff and linked to their image, then said the brand wanted to create meaningful content just for Redditors.

Throughout the Transamerica campaign:

• Stayed fully engaged and answered every question
• Inserted Humor when needed
• Stayed honest and didn’t get defensive when people said Transamerica was just trying to run a publicity campaign:

After the focus group, Transamerica created content that directly answered Redditors’ questions.
The visual content they created was Reddit-branded in colors, fonts, and imagery.

What they did next was wonderful.
Transamerica returned to the discussion and personally commented on each Redditor who inspired the new content they created and shared where to find that content:

In every detail, Transamerica became part of the Reddit community, not marketing.
Ultimately, the return on investment for Transamerica was:

• Brand awareness (this is a much-discussed use case).
• Idea content to create outside of Reddit.
• Direct interaction with customers.
• Articles and links to the site.

BridgfordStore Beef Jerky: Reddit for sale

Success on Reddit isn’t limited to big brands.

Seven years ago, an employee of BridgfordStore Beef Jerky noted that Redditors were upset about the high prices of beef jerky. So he offered a discount code (25 percent) just for people on Reddit.

It was wildly popular.

This is an example of where direct sales can work.

The first thing the deli employee did was, being a true Redditor, he listened and saw an opportunity to help.

But the campaign did not stop at the original post.

BridgfordStore followed up this post with a popular AMA that received a lot of feedback, including confirmation that the campaign was generating awareness:

It wasn’t just the buzz the store was getting from this promotion.

A Bridgfordstore Redditor posted the Reddit sales figures to show just how successful the post was – this single promotion brought in around $23,000 for Bridgfordstore Beef Jerky.

This campaign gets bonus points for the complete transparency of promotion and sales, which is appreciated by Redditors.

Things to remember

The best way to learn about Reddit is to become a Redditor yourself. This way, you can authentically engage with your audience and find the best opportunities for attracting attention, traffic, branding, product development, sales and much more.

A few key things to remember:

• Have the right people managing your Reddit presence – those with deep knowledge of Reddit.
• Select subreddits to participate in that are relevant to your business and content.
• Now, if you’re not convinced that Reddit is the place every marketer should be, take some time to see for yourself. Go around different communities and see what opportunities there might be.